How do you cut the fluff and get to the point in your business writing?

To cut the fluff and get to the point in your business writing, start by clearly defining your main message and objectives before you begin writing. Use an outline to organize your thoughts and ensure that each section serves a specific purpose. Choose concise language and avoid jargon or overly complex sentences that can dilute your message. Focus on actionable insights and relevant data that support your key points, and eliminate any unnecessary details or repetitive information.

Before you begin writing, identify your audience. If you don’t, your message won’t resonate. Audience is key to all communications. It should never be about you and what you know - it needs to be about your audience and what they need to learn.

Content should exist for a reason—ideally, for a human to read it. Don't create something because an AI told you to or because you looked up some SEO keywords. Instead, consider what the piece(s) will do to serve your readers and your business goals. It's fine to go after organic search traffic, but if that's your goal, don't expect more than a modest increase in your organic search traffic. The whole point of writing content is to say something meaningful to get people to remember your brand and your content. Otherwise, you're just another blog or social media post someone read somewhere.

As important as knowing who you are writing to, and why, is knowing the language of your reader audience. Not only asking questions, considering their responses. It's not enough to state your case, provide the information, if it's not in words they use and understand. Like active listening in print.

Ask yourself how long your audience is willing to spend reading. Is this a headline, a quick thought, or an in-depth analysis?

Plain language is fine but more importantly, use language your audiences uses. AKA: voice of customer. "Plain language" will still sound fluffy if your audience doesn't resonate with it. The least fluffy writing cuts through the noise and makes your audience nod. Word choice > Plain language.

Using simple plain language including removing jargon, idioms, and spelling out or defining technical terms and acronyms in the first instance, also makes your writing more accessible for non native speakers, people with disabilities and those with lower literacy or reading levels (eg. children or those with lower education levels).

Use the active voice for direct and engaging sentences. Instead of writing. "A new version of our product was released last night. Write: "We released a new version of our product last night." To find instances of the passive voice look for verbs that end or -EN or -ED Remember this quote from Stephen King! "The passive voice equals timid voice—and timidity never makes for good writing.""

"Write to express, not to impress," is still useful advice. This goes back to the "A" in the SOAP guide: your audience. * Use shorter words when they won't change the meaning of longer ones. * If your readers are familiar with jargon, then use it when needed. Otherwise, avoid jargon that the average reader wouldn't understand. * Active voice is usually more effective than passive voice. This advice especially holds true when we use strong verbs. The subject + verb + complement construction is always the easiest to understand. * Content is most important, but it's meaningless if your readers can't understand it the first time.

Don't bother with "fluff" – it's time to get real. When it comes to communication, cutting through the noise matters most. Forget about "plain language" – instead, focus on speaking directly to your target audience's needs and preferences. Use words and phrases they use every day, not technical jargon or overly academic language. This approach will help you create content that feels authentic, relatable, and compelling. In short, find the right voice for your audience and ditch the rest – that's how you'll keep them coming back for more.

Simple language is clear. Clarity keeps your message on point and easily understood. If your business reader has to work to understand your message, they’ll stop reading and move on to the next task (or better-written summary).

Business writing cuts to the point. It is common to avoid adverbs and to write in bullets. Grammar is optional if you make a clear point without adhering to traditional rules.

Simple language really helps you in eliminating all the fluff in your writing. Make sure you use tools like Hemingway editor or manually edit your writing several times so that it becomes easier for the reader to read the it only once.

Yes! Don't make them work to understand your points. And you know what? Their perception of you will be not as good as it could be. They might not even know why. Another tip: Try to reserve the word "will" for true conditional or future tense. It is not always necessary to start your white paper or standard or other document with "This document will describe the ..." The reader is in the present, the document has already been written. Use the present tense: "This document describes the..."

Cut unnecessary words, but leave keywords that engage readers. Over-trimming your writing can lead to dry content, leaving readers wanting more color or (worse) clicking away halfway through your content.

Most readers scan. Since they’re going to do it anyway, help them stay engaged with your content by making it easy to scan. Headings, short paragraphs, properly constructed bullets, and callouts can help your reader quickly digest your message.

Short sentences and paragraphs are appropriate for certain types of content. 1-2 sentence paragraphs are typically not ideal for white papers or ebooks. 4-6+ sentence paragraphs are typically not ideal for simple content (e.g. top of funnel and/or instructional). Look at similar content that's performing well and see what they're doing. Determine why the content is succeeding. Perhaps it's short sentences and paragraphs. Perhaps it's because there's a lot of value in a few words. Or perhaps it's because the content doesn't need to be wordy in the first place.

Great points to make ensure usability and ease of reading! Even emails could do with some subheadings and bullet points. And always lots of "white" space.

This is true to a certain extent. Breaking up your long sentences into shorter phrases is great, and makes for faster reading. HOWEVER, a whole article made up of only short sentences will make your text awkward to read. The true magic is in varying your sentence length. When you combine very short, short and medium length sentences, your content has variety which makes for even better reading.

Using short sentences is the key. It not only cuts the fluff but makes it easy to take in the information easily. It is always about getting to the point. So, why make your reader wait?

Remember that written communication lacks the nonverbal cues that help others decipher your message. This is why humor typically falls flat (unless you are a very skilled writer). Match your words and word choices to your audience.

Tone of voice is increasingly important as AI tools become ubiquitous. Always keep your audience in mind, but remember to craft your individual voice - a consistent tone and style will stick with readers over the long run.

Figure out who you are writing for and how they like to consume information before pressing send or submit. Do they want bullet point summaries, supporting imagery or longer explanations? Do they prefer statistically driven insights or respond better when you persuade them? What about language: do they gravitate towards formally language or a more informal ;) tone? Grammarly has a tone detector that can help with this.

Mistakes dilute your message and undermine your credibility. Ask someone else to read your writing as authors are typically too close to the content to notice mistakes. If you don’t have anyone who can read for you, set it aside for 24 hours before editing. If you are on deadline and didn’t build time to edit into your timeline, take a break and come back to the piece.

The easiest way to do this right is with ChatGPT. Paste your text into ChatGPT and ask it to create a bullet point summary or reduce what you pasted it to a target word-count. GrammarlyGo also has a feature that can do this. Just remember to edit the results.

When I was growing up, my dad gave me some advice about writing that I still use today: look everything up. Sound tedious? It's not - it takes less than a minute and ensures that your writing is accurate, so it gives you loads of credibility. Here's a true story: One of my previous colleagues wrote an email to an executive leader. The goal of the email was to persuade that executive to become a mentor. In the email, my colleague said that the prospective mentor needed help with business steak holders. Yes, "steak holders." If only my colleague would have looked the word up, she would have boosted her credibility instead of busted it. Look every word up. Every time. You'll never regret it.

Business leaders don't have time for fluff. They want you to get to the point so that they understand the decisions they need to make.

A few suggestions: -> Before you start writing, plan your content. An outline can help you organize your thoughts and structure your message more logically. -> Clearly state the most important information or the key message in the opening sentences to help readers understand your purpose immediately. -> Try to avoid jargon and overuse of acronyms. If you must use technical terms, explain them. -> Edit ruthlessly, streamline your writing, remove fillers and avoid tangents. And lastly, like any skill, improving business writing will take practice. The more you will write and revise, the better you will become at getting to the point without fluff.

Fluff can be strategic, but few do it well. That's why most advice to avoid it. There's less chance of making a fatal error.